RE: Since when has "Alt-Right" been synonymous with white nationalism?

(27-11-2016 10:27 AM)Metazoa Zeke Wrote:

(27-11-2016 06:22 AM)EvolutionKills Wrote: If feminism is a 'cancer', so is the Alt-Right, and for the very same reasons. I have zero fucking sympathy.

I can agree the alt-right is cancer, but not for the same reason.

His use of 'cancer' was hyperbolic, and the marginalization of either label by using the very worst examples you can attach to them is equivalent. My country is so fucked that even though the average citizens leans pretty liberal, and will say as much if asked about specific individual policies or stances. But the term 'liberal' has been unduly dragged through the mud for decades, a marginalization so bad that those same aforementioned mostly liberal citizens often self-identify as conservative. They can be pro-education, pro-Social Security, pro-Medicaid, anti-war, want better tax distribution and money out of politics, and still if asked they'll identify as conservative even while holding a suite of mostly liberal opinions. The mud slinging campaign the far right has waged for decades is a fucking coup of the highest order.

I never understood this. Obviously I don't believe sexual equality and 'progressiveness' is the idea behind those terms. Is it supposed to be witty to argue against a position I obviously don't hold lol?

"There is this mistaken assumption that satire, including this kind of satire, is intelligent or witty or indicative of intellectual sophistication. It is none of those things. Satire is easy. Writing like The Onion isn’t hard. The sarcastic paraphrase is one of the laziest ways to argue, because it doesn’t require a clear and coherent logical structure — the terms of argument are implied. As such, fallacies are harder to expose.

The sarcastic paraphrase presents a loud or obnoxious mocking paraphrase of the opponent’s position with a counter-position implied through the sarcasm. (It does not have to be in all caps. You can sound sarcastic if you write with exclamation points, too!) This should be easy to visualize, but as an example:

Megan: I don’t think we can sustain social security into the 21st century.

Christina: HHAAHAHA BECAUSE LETTING POOR PEOPLE STARVE IS SO PROGRESSIVE AND FORWARD-THINKING.

Here, Christina thinks defunding social security will make poor people starve and mocks Megan because, in Christina’s view, Megan’s position so fails to live up to this criterion that it is worthy of derision. That is, Christina’s actual position can be rephrased this way:

Megan: I don’t think we can sustain social security into the 21st century.

Christina: Social security prevents people, chief among them poor people, from starving. Defunding it will make poor people starve.

“Wow, Christina is pretty bad at debating,” you might say.

Sarcastic paraphrase is not invalid in and of itself. However, it is to argumentation what myspace angles are to beauty what playing fast is to piano what added sweetening is to wine: it makes imperfections harder to recognize.

When phrased in a direct way, Christina’s position has more transparent flaws. Even if Christina’s position were true, if social security is unsustainable — that is, funding it perpetually will eventually collapse the economy — Christina would have a lot more to worry about than poor people starving, because poor people would starve either way. (This assuming Megan’s claim is true; I don’t know whether or not social security is unsustainable.)

A more direct refutation would attack the sustainability issue itself, asserting that it is sustainable, that the concept of economic sustainability is somehow flawed, etc. — but through sarcasm, the faults of the counterargument are harder to see"